This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
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“The real question for Republicans in Washington is how low can you go, because we are approaching a level of ridiculousness,” said Mr. Reed, sounding exasperated in an interview on Tuesday morning. “You can’t make this stuff up. And the impact this is having on the grass-roots around the country is devastating. Republicans think the governing class in Washington are a bunch of buffoons who have total disregard for the principles of the party, the law of the land and the future of the country.”

By all rights, those who believe in Intelligent Design should also believe in Malevolent Design.

Malevolent Design, simply put, is the secondary negative quality that one should see if one first sees intelligence.

If there be a master designer then one should be able to gauge how it feels about its creations by the interaction between them. For example, malaria...

You would think that fetuses, babies, children and pregnant women would be high on the list of favored individuals for a deity's protection. I know that my personal idea of what makes a good parent, on a basic level, would be simply to care about its children. Designing pathogens to infect, torture and kill them doesn't qualify. The World Health Organization estimates "that each year 300-500 million cases of malaria occur and more than 1 million people die of malaria. About 1,300 cases of malaria are diagnosed in the United States each year."

Considering how advanced we are as a species, with all our technology, we still have not eradicated this parasite. That's great design!

SEN. CRAIG: Well, I don't know where the Senate's going to be on that issue of an up or down vote on impeachment, but I will tell you that the Senate certainly can bring about a censure resolution and it's a slap on the wrist. It's a, "Bad boy, Bill Clinton. You're a naughty boy." The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy, a naughty boy.

I'm going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.

Yep, we armed Saddam Hussein in the 1970's and he later used the weapons against us. Now we're arming the Saudis, the Pakistanis and the insurgents in Iraq. Duh - I don't even need to state the obvious.

Discriminating against others, so it seems to me, has only one purpose and that is to elevate your own sense of self-worth by lowering that of others. It appears to be true whether we are talking about black people, brown people, gay people, people of other faiths, people of other political parties, or people of other nations. I guess I am guilty of it as well. I think the vast majority of right-wing conservative political views are absolutely nuts.But - and I hope this is where a difference lies - I would never relegate them to some sub-standard sort of existence wherein they were denied the basic rights of our civilization. As much as I despise the current political leaders and their followers in this country, I wouldn't, as a class, deny them the right to speak their mind, or to worship their God, or deny them the right to marry. (There are, however, in my mind, some that should be in jail.)But the story I quote from below, shows that discrimination has not always been the history of mankind. There have always been some "enlightened" people in our history - and it makes me feel good.

Civil unions between male couples existed around 600 years ago in medieval Europe, a historian now says.

Historical evidence, including legal documents and gravesites, can be interpreted as supporting the prevalence of homosexual relationships hundreds of years ago, said Allan Tulchin of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

If accurate, the results indicate socially sanctioned same-sex unions are nothing new, nor were they taboo in the past.

This is a day or two old - lots in the news about this Republican hypocrite today. God, how many of these repressed Republican assholes have I reported on now? I've lost track - must be at least 20 of them...

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men's public restroom, according to an arrest report obtained by Roll Call Monday afternoon.

A spokesman for Craig described the incident as a “he said/he said misunderstanding,” and said the office would release a fuller statement later Monday afternoon.

After he was arrested, Craig, who is married, was taken to the Airport Police Operations Center to be interviewed about the lewd conduct incident, according to the police report. At one point during the interview, Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, “What do you think about that?” the report states.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's unexpectedly strong second-place showing in the recent Iowa Republican straw poll is widely attributed to his support for the FairTax.

For those who never heard about it, the FairTax is a national retail sales tax that would replace the entire current federal tax system. It was originally devised by the Church of Scientology in the early 1990s as a way to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service, with which the church was then at war (at the time the IRS refused to recognize it as a legitimate religion). The Scientologists' idea was that since almost all states have sales taxes, replacing federal taxes with the same sort of tax would allow them to collect the federal government's revenue and thereby get rid of their hated enemy, the IRS.

Rep. John Linder (R., Ga.) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R., Ga.) have introduced legislation (H.R. 25/S. 1025) to implement the FairTax. They assert that a rate of 23% would be sufficient to replace federal individual and corporate income taxes as well as payroll and estate taxes. Mr. Linder's Web site claims that U.S. gross domestic product will rise 10.5% the first year after enactment, exports will grow by 26%, and real investment spending will increase an astonishing 76%.

In reality, the FairTax rate is not 23%. Messrs. Linder and Chambliss get this figure by calculating the tax as if it were already incorporated into the price of goods and services. (This is known as the tax-inclusive rate.) Calculating it the conventional way that every other (This is called the tax-exclusive rate.)[NB - the above paragraph is cut off in the original article. That last sentence should be corrected as follows...Calculating it the conventional way that every other percent is calculated (P=RxB for those who remember their middle school math), it would be a 30% tax rate. In other words, anything that curently costs $1 would cost $1.30 under the new Fair Tax. (This is called the tax-exclusive rate.)]

From OpinionJournal.The Fair Tax is not a new concept in the American political scene. A couple of election cycles ago, Steve Forbes ran for President with the Fair Tax standing as the basis for his platform. Something very interesting to consider if it intrigues you - this is being proposed by rich people because it will mean all investments will be tax free. Those who can afford to buy stocks and bonds will see dividends and interest payments all accrue tax free. Although I've not read any definitive definition of the "Fair Tax," I'd guess that it will only be levied on retail sales making all transactions between corporations, for purchase of raw materials, tax free.Because the poor spend nearly 100% of their income on retail purchases (food, clothing, shelter, etc.) and the rich spend a much smaller percentage of their income in this manner (they are far more likely to invest in the aforementioned stocks and bonds), the tax will fall incredibly hard on poor people.Assuming no change in retail prices, were a fair tax to be levied, the imapct on someone making $20,000 a year (for a family of four, they would currently pay little if any income tax) would be to reduce their purchasing power by 30%, to roughly $14,000. It would be devastating.As usual, the fat cats are proposing a system that would penalize poor perople for being poor while reward ing the rich for being so astute as to have gotten rich.

As the British pull back from their positions in Iraq, it's interesting to watch who takes over. The pro-war groups tell us that the south of Iraq is relatively peaceful and that none of the sectarian violence exists there, but that may not be the case for long. There's a lot more to this story, if it interests you - see the link below the quotes.

BASRA, Iraq: Shiite militiamen from the Mahdi Army took over the police joint command center in Basra on Sunday after British soldiers withdrew from the facility and handed control to the Iraqi police, witnesses said.

Police left the building when the militiamen, loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, arrived, the witnesses said.

The British military disputed the reports, saying they had been in contact with the Iraqi general in charge of security in Basra, who has said the Mahdi Army was not there.

But the witnesses said the Mahdi Army emptied the building — taking generators, computers, furniture and even cars, saying it was war booty — and remained there in the early evening.

The British military had maintained a small number of soldiers at the command center to help train Iraqi police.

A story at Daily Kos has me chuckling. In light of a political race for the US Presidency that has started a year too early for most of us, many states are moving up the dates for thir primary votes. Florida tried to jump the gun, and now this....

I do not have brass balls. I'm not one of those folks who is so self-confident that I believe the whole world loves me, so it is hard for me to understand those that DO have brass balls. The following is just priceless in my own humble opinion.

Have some extra cash? Feel like going to heaven? Then you might consider sending Ted Haggard and his family some monthly checks for the next two years while they move into a halfway house and get psychology and counseling degrees from the University of Phoenix.

An excerpt from a letter from Ted:

It looks as though it will take two years for us to have adequate earning power again, so we are looking for people who will help us monthly for two years. During that time we will continue as full time students, and then, when I graduate, we won't need outside support any longer.

Ted Haggard, you may recall, is the former minister who preached an anti-homosexual agenda, then was caught having relations with a gay prostitute who was selling him drugs.From J-Walk Blog.